How Elon Musk could become a trillionaire!
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk with Aviva Insurance.
What are SpaceX's plans for going public?
You may have heard this morning, Elon Musk's SpaceX has revealed its plans to go public in the United States, allowing people to trade shares in the firm on the stock market. And it could make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. Joe Lynham, Newstalk's business editor, joins me. Joe, these are just astonishing figures, aren't they?
Absolutely mind-boggling numbers. The man is already worth 800 billion US dollars. That's around 730, 740 billion euros. Because he is 85% controlling stake in SpaceX, which is now set to float on the stock exchange, could be as early as next month, in fact. that would give him roughly or give the company a value of 1.75 trillion US dollars because he controls the vast majority of that.
How could Elon Musk become the world's first trillionaire?
By my calculations, he will be worth at least twice as much as the entire Irish economy. As you add up all the property in this country, all the assets take away and all the liabilities, and he would be worth two times at least the size of the entire Irish economy.
Extraordinary. So listen, talk to me about the company, about SpaceX, because I don't think we're all really clear on exactly what this company does and why it is so valuable.
In my opinion, some of it is very clever accounting, but some of it is very real in terms of their income. Now, SpaceX obviously send rockets into space, and they've been doing that for about a decade and a half. They do a lot of work for NASA. You know, you used to think that NASA sent rockets into space, but they outsource a lot of that to SpaceX. They put a lot of satellites into space for all manner of governments and companies. They also own Starlink, which is already the satellites that float around the Earth and are becoming one of the more reliable ways to communicate.
What makes SpaceX so valuable?
Ask the Ukrainians how valuable Starlink is, because obviously there's no functioning 4G or 5G in a battlefield environment, so they rely on Starlink to send messages to their drones, and then the drones are in the battlefield against the Russians. And they owned XAI. So in other words, he formed an AI company out of X, kind of sold it to himself, and it has a value in the hundreds of billions as well. So add all of that together, that's why they're coming up with a valuation of $1.75 billion.
They have a lot of real estate in terms of data centers as well in the southern part of America. Anthropic are paying them, paying SpaceX a lot of cash, $15 billion a year to use those assets. So that's another income stream.
Absolutely. And 15 billion might seem small compared to the value of Starlink or other assets like that. He has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. And of course, remember, he already is a huge shareholder in Tesla, which sell a lot of cars around the world. Other shares are falling in Europe for political reasons. But he's If you add in Tesla and SpaceX, when it is floated, which could be, like I said, as early as next month, he would then control two of the biggest companies in the world. And they're top 10 companies and he will control two of them.
So why do this now?
Well, he's great aspirations, as you know. He wants money to go to Mars. He wants to go to Mars. He wants to colonize Mars.
How does SpaceX contribute to NASA and global communications?
Part of his pay package is that he would colonize Mars and turn Mars into a giant data center. Now, no one has gone to Mars yet. So you can't fault the guy for ambition. He is in his mid-50s. Whether he will ever make it to Mars remains to be seen because it is such a big venture. But that is what he wants to do. He wants all this money to do that.
So the market experts, the people that you talk to all of the time, are they excited by this news?
They love IPOs, initial public offerings. They love the excitement, love the build-up, how much will it float on the day. In other words, there's a launch price, but you and I will never get in at that launch price. The investment banks, the Goldman Sachs and the Morgan Stanley's of this world, they get in at that launch price. The real known unknown on IPO day is does it jump or does it fall on launch day?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–0:09
2
What are SpaceX's plans for going public?
0:09–0:59
3
How could Elon Musk become the world's first trillionaire?
0:59–2:00
4
What makes SpaceX so valuable?
2:00–3:24
5
How does SpaceX contribute to NASA and global communications?
3:24–4:36
6
What are the implications of SpaceX's IPO for investors?
4:36–5:52
7
What ethical concerns surround Elon Musk and his companies?
5:52–6:23
8
How might Elon Musk use his wealth if he becomes a trillionaire?
6:23–6:29
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Claire Byrne Show
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